Are the Democrats Better Off Now?

“I don’t think anyone thought that was a good moment for the country,” Senator Bob Casey, of Pennsylvania, said. Casey was standing on the stairs of the Mint Museum of Art, in Charlotte, at a party for Pennsylvania’s delegates to the Democratic National Convention, and he was talking about Clint Eastwood. Senator Casey hadn’t actually seen Eastwood’s full speech in front of the other party’s convention, in Tampa, or that of the empty chair onstage with him, but he’d seen clips, and that was enough: “There are ways to talk about the other side without being disrespectful.” Maybe there are; in the interlude between Tampa and Charlotte, though, they have been harder to find than people who thought that Eastwood’s appearance was excellent.

Around Casey in the museum, delegates and other Pennsylvanians were eating grits and shrimp and biscuits and ham; there was a slide show and film clips of President Obama in one room, and an exhibit in another: “Celebrating Queen Charlotte’s Coronation.” That took place in 1761, after Charlotte’s marriage to George III, but coronation seemed like an appropriate theme for this week. Obama has dissatisfied factions inside his party, but none seem as ready as the Ron Paul supporters in Tampa were to disrupt the proceedings from within. (Street protesters, whether anti-abortion rights or anti-“Wall Street South,” will be another question; there was a quick flare-up near midnight Monday, and the security gets tighter today.) Paul had enough delegates in enough states to at least ask for recognition that the Romney campaign was fixated on denying. The result was hard feelings and a fight over delegate seating and party rules. Nobody seems to care about party rules in Charlotte. Alan Kennedy-Shaffer, a lawyer for the Pennsylvania Liquor Control Board who is on the rules committee, said that the only real changes he’d had to vote on before their approval were fixes to “a few minor typos.” Some of the typos were in language that had been otherwise intact since the nineties; no one had caught or cared to fix them since then.

With the podium all to themselves, what will Obama and his cohort have to say? On Monday, the day before the convention officially opened, some Democrats seemed afraid of their own words. Mitt Romney, in his speech, had said that Americans simply had to ask whether they were better off now than they were four years ago; Paul Ryan repeated that on Monday, telling a crowd in North Carolina that Obama could not claim that they were. Since Reagan came up with the line, who hasn’t? And yet the Democrats’ first reaction was to hesitate or hedge (David Axelrod, the President’s adviser, talked about being in a better “position,” and Governor Martin O’Malley of Maryland just said things were worse), or to treat this as an explosive line of inquiry, or simply to fail to invoke any sense of political romance. (“I think we are, though it’s still a hard time,” Casey said when I asked him the question. He then spoke in detail about statistical issues in tracking unemployment numbers.)

That uncertainty—corrected a bit on Monday, loudly, by Joe Biden—seemed less about whether Democrats really doubted that Americans, on the whole, were better off, than about their fear that any given phrase could be pulled out and jumped on or outright distorted. That’s no way to live, politically. In Tampa, some variation of the line “Mr. President, I did build that” appeared in so many speeches that it began to sound like a loyalty oath. It didn’t seem to matter that Obama had never actually dismissed the work involved in building a business; he’d been talking about roads and schools, which not even Paul Ryan could claim to build with only his own bare hands. (Or maybe he would.) In Charlotte, the Democrats will need an “I built that” answer that confronts both the false notes and the falsity of the charges made against them, without getting mixed up about which they are doing. (This will likely be Elizabeth Warren’s assignment when she speaks to the convention.)

“Are you better off now than you were four years ago” is also a homing device, seeking to connect Romney with those who, whatever their material circumstances, are anxious, or scared, or angry, in ways that they connect to politics, broadly defined. What Romney really asked is, Are you happier now than you were four years ago, particularly when you look at your President or think about your government? Put another way: How much has your Obama poster faded?

Posters do fade; maybe they should, as cheering for an upstart gives way to skepticism of someone with power. The Obama campaign would like to see some more posters, though, at least for election season. Michelle Obama speaks Tuesday, and that can only help. (Bill Clinton speaks Wednesday; that one could be interesting.) But the political absurdity in the air can be a bad temptation. On Monday, the reports from delegation breakfasts and caucuses were of more than one speaker playing Eastwood, and addressing an empty chair.